Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done. I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here. I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. I happen to have a Mac â?? a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive â?? and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It's just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is. I think Red Hat knows this. And it's OK with it.

I'm supposed to have a meeting with Dell next week, during which they'll talk about their consumer-focused plans for the near future and at the same time show me some hot new product that I'll be bound not to talk about for a specified period of time. Great. I told the PR guy, "What I really want to know about is the soon-to-be-released Dell E," meaning Dell's answer to the Asus Eee (note the similar names) and HP Mini-Note.

I've heard through the grapevine that Oracle and Red Hat are in the midst of...something. Some suggest acquisition. Others insist partnership. Still others speculate that absolutely nothing is going on at all.

I'd been complaining for at least a month about how I couldn't install Google Gears to gain offline functionality for Google Docs because Gears only supported Firefox 1.5 to 2.x, and I was running Ubuntu 8.04 with Firefox 3 and Debian Lenny with Iceweasel. Now that Gears works with Firefox 3, Ubuntu is taken care of. But I could've done this weeks ago, had I only come up with this solution: I could (and now am) running Google Gears with Docs in Puppy Linux.

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3. Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it's nice to have choices.

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release. Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn't even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3. While the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it's 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren't relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

Here's what I like about Slackware: In the default installation, just about everything works ... easy-to-use console utilities ... a bunch of window managers ... long-term support ... slapt-get ... three major Web browsers ... great projects derived from Slackware ... default fonts that look better than the default fonts in Debian ... and an extremely fast way to run KDE.

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

[Not directly related to open source, but the whole idea of metered broadband would/will have a dramatic effect on everything we do — steve]

This article will try to provide a contrast between ‘the Debian way’ and ‘the Slackware way’ when it comes to distribution management. The idea is to really attempt to illuminate people on why Debian, and many other distributions may not be ideal, and why a classic approach such as Slackware still has merit in this world of modern feature-crazy distributions. I start this article knowing full well that it will offend people, even so, I think this needs to be said.

I have been tracking the Debian release goals progress for a while now, through bug-squashing parties and using various iterations of wiki pages. It's time to write down some thoughts. First of all, I think the concept of release goals is a fantastic idea. It may be one of the most important conceptual moves in Debian of late. It allows developers to implement distribution-wide changes without having to negotiate with every package maintainer individually and without having to go through the vicious no-change-without-policy / no-policy-without-established-practice maze.

For those new to Slackware, here are a few quick tips on adding groups to user accounts, using sudo, getting Slack to recognize your wheel mouse, and using slapt-get to make a new installation work a bit better.

Now that I have a working Slackware installation on my test box, which has seen Slackware before, everything is working so well that I'm reluctant to install one of the GNOME add-on projects just yet.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu. Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3 -- nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I've used Josh Grosse's jggimi live CD version of OpenBSD to test hardware compatibility recently, but now there's a new live CD project based on OpenBSD called BSDanywhere.

I've probably written a dozen or more times about how I think that OpenOffice is the killer app of free, open-source software, and is the software suite that most worries the folks at Microsoft while empowering more and more regular people every day ... but that I have little call to use it myself. That has changed.

GetDeb is an interesting project. It's a collection of packages that are compatible with Ubuntu but not yet in the official Ubuntu repositories.